Team Expansion & Collaboration
Expertise: Exploratory Research Role: Director of Product Company: Venngage When: Feb 2022
TL;DR
Background:
Venngage is a simple design platform for busy professionals. The tool offers thousands of pre-built templates that can be customized in a user-friendly drag & drop editor. As a B2C and B2B SaaS product, Venngage empowers individuals and teams to create professional designs, manage all their content, and maintain brand consistency with ease, even if they lack design experience.
While the tool was designed for teamwork, there were several functionalities missing that made it challenging for teams to collaborate efficiently, particularly for larger teams and enterprise customers.
Goal:
Validate whether the team should focus on team expansion
Highlight areas of opportunities that would accelerate team expansion & collaboration
Deliverables:
Present research and insights to exec team
Create user journey flows for each member type
Finalize annual OKRs
Prioritize features/experiments for product development team
Impact:
We improved team onboarding experiences, pricing, feature visibility for free users, content management, member and guest permissions, and defined team success metrics
We launched several experiments to encourage team and guest invites and saw an increase by 45%
The research format
Exploratory research with context and action items
We wanted to have a productive planning meeting with insights presented and quantifiable next steps. Since this exercise was meant to be more exploratory, this is the structure we started off with:
Areas of research- Identify the swimlane
Questions you are trying to answer- This will give you a starting point
Discovery phase- Dive into metrics and user flows
Summarize results & findings- Add takeaways to each section. What areas should we prioritize? What metric are we trying to move? How will we evaluate success/failure?
Starting with questions I’m are trying to answer
Giving the research some margins
I mapped out a high level overview of what the stages in the ideal user journey looked like. In doing so, I was able to ensure my questions spanned across key product areas. This also came in handy when building funnels later on.
Discovery
Analyzing Metrics
Using the questions as a rough outline, I dove into Mixpanel and looked into metrics that helped answer some of the unknowns. I looked at current and historical conversion rates segmented by different properties (like role, organization, team size) to identify any patterns or anomalies. This practice helped me uncover the user flows that worked, the ones that weren’t worth our time, and the ones that needed intervention.
Insights from analyzing metrics:
We had 3 invite flows in the product with decent conversion rates but low volume. We needed to improve and/or increase the team invite call to action button.
Using overall upgrades as a benchmark, I found that paid team member conversion rates are significantly higher, which reconfirms the opportunities to focus on team expansion.
Execs and marketers are more likely to invite team members. This allows us to focus on specific workflows, run smaller experiments, and craft detailed user stories.
More users download instead of share via link. In order to retain these customers in the long-term, we need to shift the feature usage from downloads to sharing so collaboration occurs within the product.
Team admins generally invite team members when their designs are complete and are ready for feedback.
Redefine activation for teams since active teams don’t exclusively edit— they create, edit, view only, and/or comment. This contributes to the need for new onboarding journeys.
Analyzing behaviour & designs of teams with high LTV
In addition to looking at metrics, I ran a qualitative study on our highly retained teams to get an understanding of what they were doing and creating. We had users who propagated teams unprompted and I was interested to see if there were certain features or paths they went through that correlated with team expansion.
What were teams creating?
I looked at 5 teams and found interesting design patterns that supported the team use case:
Most enterprise teams had consistent branding in all their designs
Heavy use of branded assets that were being re-used across designs
Active teams showed multi-category use and repeated use of single designs. This was usually a process or list infographic that they updated overtime
What were guests doing?
Since guests were the only members that did not show “General Activation” signs (Creation, activation in editor, or download activity), I took a sample of 38 guests in active teams and analyzed their user flows. Some interesting insights were:
Only 26% of guests showed signs of “General Activation”: This means users created, completed and engaged with the editor
40% of those users qualify for “guest activation”. These users previewed designs, created and a couple commented on designs. Only 2 out of those 28 users showed intent to comment but that’s likely because it’s a hidden flow.
Activity insights showed guests were lost after onboarding as new users which suggests an opportunity for better team onboarding experiences.
20% of guests went through upgrade flows. Could be either unintentional or intentional but validates the need to explore guest upgrade flows.
Measuring Success
How do we measure team expansion?
We found that team owners periodically rebuilt their teams by adding and removing members. We noticed inviting team members didn’t happen all at once and there was a combination of both collaboration and referral propagation within these teams. This was important because we were putting too much emphasis on team invites early in the user journey as opposed to showing them the value of collaboration later on in their design process.
In order to track expansion, we decided to use a combination of these as our KPIs:
Invites over time for both paid members and guests
Creation and Completion by Member Type
Share Usage by Member Type
Delete Team member (as an indicator teams are rebuilding their team)
Collaborating on the team vision
Brainstorming features with the team
We ran a brainstorming exercise with the team after I presented the initial research findings and current user journey. The goal of this brainstorm session was not to land on concrete decisions but simply to map out areas of opportunities that needed to be prioritized at a later date.
Visualizing the ideal user journey by member type
In order to articulate the best course forward, I visualized what the user flows could look like if we improved existing flows and expanded on our enterprise/team offerings. This led to productive discussions during the planning meeting because we had the user research, insights and a high level idea of how the opportunities fit into the Venngage product vision.
Impact
Research impact
Features we prioritized:
This research eventually led to building features that supported our team expansion & collaboration vision:
Pricing experiments: Emphasizing team value propositions like collaboration, professional templates and brand kits
More emphasis on Share Vs Download: Improving the share product flows so more users reap the benefits of real time collaboration and asynchronous feedback
Commenting feature in editor: Users can comment on designs, iterate and resolve issues right in the editor
Content Management: Teams can now manage all their designs, brand kits and shared assets in one place
Workspaces: Perfect for large organizations with multiple departments that needs a design solution to scale as their business grows
